Brain damage causes false memory

• April 19, 2024

What happens with memory when it is presented brain damage ? For a long time it was thought that patients who unfortunately have had this injury, experienced a total loss of memory. But that statement has been questioned, due to a hypothesis that states that those who have suffered brain damage do not lose memories, but that in his mind a kind of "false memory ".

This means that memories are formed in the patients' minds that are completely real to them, but they do not really correspond to the individual's past. However, researchers, including the doctor Sthephanie McTighe , offer an alternative explanation that links memory not only to a region of the brain, but to several areas that interact at the same time , in which the stimuli received from abroad also intervene

In an experiment published by the magazine Science, made with laboratory rats, it was observed that this position is not far from reality, since with this one can investigate that patients with some brain damage instead of seeing familiar objects as new, could be seeing new objects as familiar , creating a kind of "false memory " for themselves.

In the study, they were introduced to rodents a familiar object and a new one (as was done so far in most of the memory studies tests) and analyzed the response of the rats with brain damage and healthy .

Normally, healthy rats devote less time to investigate the familiar object, which shows some kind of memory, and more time to investigate the new object. However, they noticed that rats with brain damage responded as if they recognized both objects .

When the researchers placed the rats in a dark environment, to limit their visual stimuli, they discovered that brain-damaged rats no longer confused the familiar objects of the new ones.

This finding implies that the constant bombardment of visual stimuli to which the brain is subjected each time we open our eyes, has power to influence fragmented memories in the brain that may not have fully developed or not been established.

The study suggests that memory loss after a brain damage can be understood better, not in terms of loss of a system dedicated to a specific type of memory (for example, long-term versus short-term), but depending on the representations of the stimuli that they contain the different regions.

According to this point of view, people with damages in certain regions should not see altered only a particular type of memory, but also the cognitive functions that require representations of complex stimuli.

The combination of these results with those of previous studies suggests that there are specific areas of the brain that contribute to the formation of memory and not just a determined brain region.

The team believes that this discovery will open the debate to investigate a new concept of how the brain processes memory.

Source: El Universal

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